Reagan Lawyer Ready to Return to White House

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — President Bush has chosen Fred F. Fielding as the new chief White House lawyer, adding to his team a longtime Washington legal hand and veteran of the post.

Mr. Fielding forged his skills in politically charged episodes like Watergate and the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981.

White House officials said Mr. Bush would announce as early as Tuesday that Mr. Fielding would return as White House counsel, succeeding Harriet E. Miers, who announced her resignation last week. The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss an unannounced personnel decision.

Mr. Fielding’s agreement to take the job surprised some of his closest friends. The friends said last week, when his name surfaced as a contender for the position, that they would be surprised if he would give up a successful corporate practice for another stint of what promises to be heavy partisan battle at age 67.

Since then, he has kept a hand in politics and government, helping screen job candidates for President Bush during and after his transition, and serving on the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.

Several friends said they believed that he had been under heavy pressure to return as White House counsel by an administration girding for a raft of investigations by the new Democratic Congress.

The news of his selection was first reported on Monday afternoon on the Time magazine Web site.

Officials said Mr. Fielding was always a leading candidate of the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, who is said to have been seeking a possible change in the counsel’s office from the moment he took over as chief of staff in April.

But several Republicans close to the White House said Mr. Bush swiftly dismissed that notion. Ms. Miers had been Mr. Bush’s lawyer in Texas and followed him here. Mr. Bush nominated her to the Supreme Court in 2005, but she withdrew amid criticism of her qualifications.

Mr. Bolten pushed again for a new White House counsel after the Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in November and he concluded that the president would need a more seasoned Washington creature in the months ahead, Republicans close to the administration said.

He found one in Mr. Fielding, known as such an expert player of the inside game of Washington politics that he had even been suspected as Deep Throat, the confidential source of information who led to the disclosures of the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Fielding was not Deep Throat, but he is likely to bring a more sophisticated sense of the interplay among Congress, the news media and the White House than Ms. Miers.

Photo

When Fred F. Fielding was on the Sept. 11 commission, he met Beverly Ecket in New York. Her husband, Sean Rooney, died in the attacks.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

The selection of such a battle-hardened hand as Mr. Fielding for the counsel post underscores the degree to which the White House is girding for potentially intense battles with Democrats. He would help prepare for the possibility that the new Congress may use hearings and, possibly, subpoenas to challenge Mr. Bush’s broad assertions of executive power.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sounded a somewhat combative note.

“I’m hopeful that he will understand that the best way to represent his client is to cooperate when the Congress asks for information,” Mr. Waxman said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Fielding has a nuanced record on executive privilege and partisan confrontation. Associates say he is as likely to head for the negotiating table as to the wrestling mat.

Lee H. Hamilton, the Democratic vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, said Mr. Fielding had a major role in securing information and testimony from the White House that it was initially loathe to share.

“He understood the problems for the White House and he understood the demands of the commission,” Mr. Hamilton said. “He played a key role in working it out for us in an amicable way, and it didn’t come easily.”

In the counsel’s position, Mr. Fielding will lead a White House legal team that includes David S. Addington, the powerful chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Both officials have advocated a tough line in protecting executive power against perceived intrusions by Congress.

A Republican close to the White House said Mr. Fielding had maintained close ties to Mr. Cheney, whom he has known for decades, and had occasionally been an informal adviser to him.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who worked with Mr. Fielding in the Reagan administration and remains close to him, said:

“He has a firm, clear view of executive prerogative, but he also understands as well as anyone in Washington the constitutional need for compromise. He is not someone that takes an absolutist position and then drives the presidency and the branches together off the brink. He has judgment.”

Mr. Luttig said Mr. Fielding had wrestled somewhat with the decision to become White House counsel, but ultimately, “He did this out of a sense of obligation and patriotism, and that was the sole reason.”

Republicans close to the White House said Mr. Fielding had assurances of having a wide berth that he apparently received last week in a meeting with Mr. Bush.

Kenneth M. Duberstein, a chief of staff for Mr. Reagan, said because Mr. Fielding had been an aide to two presidents he would not be cowed by the Oval Office or so charmed by the president that he would shy from giving potentially unwelcome advice.

“Fred has an independence of judgment and independence of stature,” Mr. Duberstein said. “He knows how to deliver tough news.”

All the same, Mr. Fielding is clearly being brought in to draw legal lines in the sand.

“He brings enormous credibility to both sides, but he’s the president’s counsel,” said Wayne Berman, a Republican lobbyist who is friendly with Mr. Fielding and whose wife is the White House social secretary, Lea Berman. “He’s not there to represent the views of the Congress.”

Correction: January 20, 2007

A picture caption with a front-page article on Jan. 9 about the naming of Fred F. Fielding as the chief White House lawyer misspelled the surname of a woman, whose husband was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, who spoke to Mr. Fielding at a meeting of the Sept. 11 commission when he was on that panel. She is Beverly Eckert, not Ecket.

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